ABSTRACT
Higher speed data transmissions are strongly expected in mobile communication services. However, there will be a serious problem. As data transmission rates increase, a larger transmit power is required to keep the same received bit energy necessary for the required quality of service (QoS). To avoid such large transmit power, the cell size should be significantly reduced, resulting in a nano-cell or pico-cell network. One efficient realization of such networks is the virtual cellular network (VCN), in which each virtual cell (VC) consists of a central port (CP), which is a gateway to the network and many distributed wireless ports (WPs). The signal transmitted from a mobile terminal is received by its surrounding WPs and relayed to the CP using a wireless multi-hop technique. This chapter introduces the wireless multi-hop VCN concept suitable for high-speed packet data services in future mobile communication systems. A novel multi-hop route construction algorithm and a distributed dynamic channel allocation algorithm for multi-hop VCN are presented.
